There is no smoke without fire. Yes, the rumour was true: Google Talk is out. You can IM, you can talk. At least to your friends with a Gmail account for the moment (including me: my first name dot my last name at gmail.com).

Even if Google spokepersons have kept a low profile, there are a lot of implications to that launch. Isn't it tempting to add Google Ads in the bottom of chats? They are already doing it in Gmail.

From what I read, Google is proposing a common technology for all IM clients. If they are able to federate the industry/market, then they will have a platform as strong as the web and stronger than RSS to push targeted advertising.

From Business Week today:

Georges Harik, Google's director of product management, says the company has opened communications with AOL and Yahoo, offering them interoperability on the Google Talk network free, and it will soon contact Microsoft. It remains to be seen whether these big players, especially AOL, which runs both its AOL Instant Messenger service and the globally popular ICQ service, will take Google up on its offer.
(...)
One thing Harik says Google Talk won't have is advertising. "You have to be careful about advertising with IM," he says. "It's not necessarily the right platform to insert advertisements." Yet it's an important question for all the IM players because although millions of people use IM, so far it has yet to be a significant profit center for any of the services.

As I explained in that short presentation about DRM, I believe that, in technology at least, first entrants have to use proprietary formats and standards to protect their market and then their market share. The later entrants have to build on standards to develop theirs. So it's still not clear to me whether Google wants a popular IM service, a new output for ads,... or both.

To end that addendum, I suggested a Google/Skype "merger" yesterday but some at O'Reilly have other views.